preview

Chris Mccandless Tragic Hero Essay

Decent Essays

To begin with, a tragic hero “must be a person of some stature or high position” and while Chris was no king or nobleman, he was born into a privileged family and came from an upper-class background. His father, Samuel Walter McCandless, had worked for NASA before starting a private consulting service that “aligned with remote sensor and satellite system design, and associated signal processing, data reduction and information extraction tasks” (Krakauer 104-105). Although money was tight at the start, eventually Chris’s family was able to take multiple vacations as Billie and Sam McCandless started making generous amounts of money and were successful in their business. However, money was not the only characteristic that established Chris as a …show more content…

Despite Chris’s repeated efforts to hold people at a distance, he inherently formed many bonds along his travels. Upon graduating from college, Chris donated all of his money ($25,000) to OXFAM, a charity fighting hunger. Third, a tragic hero “must possess a character trait that proves to be a fatal flaw.” For McCandless, this flaw would be his self- confidence because, once he was successful in his many road trips across the U.S., Chris believed that he could survive anything, especially after his near death experience on the Colorado River. Chris’s confidence was also the reason for his going into the Alaskan wilderness with only a ten-pound bag of rice, minimal gear, cheap leather hiking books, a .22 caliber, his books and his camera. Ultimately, Chris McCandless was somewhat responsible for his death in choosing not to bring a map or a compass which could have shown him that further up the Teklanika River was his way of crossing the raging rapids through the means of a cable spanning the gorge that was used in the 1970s in order for hydrologists “to chart the Teklanika’s seasonal fluctuations” (Krakauer

Get Access